It’s the End of the World . . . Sort Of

[Valin]

City Journal:

Climate-change alarmists warn of the apocalypse but push for meaningless international agreements.

Oren Cass

Oct. 15 2017

 

 

Final preparations are underway for COP21 in Paris, the biggest international climate-change negotiation since 2009’s epic failure in Copenhagen. This time, the fix is in: negotiators have established a process guaranteed to produce an agreement, albeit a meaningless one. Rather than set firm restrictions on greenhouse-gas emissions, each nation is invited to submit its own proposed “contribution” to that goal. The sum total of these contributions—though they may not represent significant emissions reductions and will not be enforceable in any case—will constitute the “agreement.”

 

The idea, according to a preliminary negotiating text, is to “enable an upward spiral of ambition over time,” but as a commentary in Nature noted on Monday: “History and the science of cooperation predict that quite the opposite will happen.” Indeed, China and India have offered contributions weaker than their existing policies, and some of the largest developing nations have declined even to submit proposals. The most recent draft agreement text, meanwhile, reads like a bad Mad-Lib, bracketed to show those areas where agreement remains pending: “Each Party [shall][should][other] regularly communicate a nationally determined mitigation [contribution][commitment][other] that it [shall][should][other] implement.”

 

The farcical proceedings make clear the irreconcilable gap between the rhetorical excesses and practical realities of the climate-change debate. With apologies to Alex Trebek, if the answer is the Paris process of collating non-binding commitments to do nothing, then the question cannot be, “How do we save the world?” And yet, to hear the climate activists tell it, the survival of the world is precisely what’s at stake.

 

At issue here is not the broad scientific consensus that climate-change exists but rather the severity of the threat............(Snip)